What a landlord should hand over clean

There is an entire industry of advice about leaving a rented home properly and almost nothing about arriving in one. That is backwards, because the state you arrive in is the state you will eventually be measured against — and the only moment you can do anything about it is before your furniture is standing in it. This is the half nobody explains: what you can reasonably expect on the day you get the keys, and the hour that decides how the last day goes.

Nobody mentions this half

Ask anybody in the Netherlands about renting and cleaning and you will get advice about the end: the deposit, the inspection, the oven. Ask what you are entitled to on the FIRST day and the room goes quiet.

Yet the two are the same question asked twice. A home handed to you with a filthy oven becomes, eighteen months later, a home you are handing back with a filthy oven — and by then the only person in the room who remembers whose grease it was is you, without evidence.

Everything you do not photograph on day one, you own on the last day.

What follows is the general picture rather than legal advice. Your agreement governs the specifics, and the Huurcommissie or het Juridisch Loket are the people to ask about your own.

What you can reasonably expect

The usual standard for a handover is clean and fit to live in. Not renovated, not perfect, not repainted — but not carrying the previous tenancy either. In practice that means:

• The kitchen is clean inside as well as outside — oven, fridge, cupboards and the extractor filter. Inside is the part that gets skipped.
• The bathroom is sanitary: toilet, shower, drains, and limescale dealt with rather than smeared.
• Floors are clean, including the edges and under where furniture stood.
• Nothing of the last tenant is left — in cupboards, in the loft, on the balcony, in the storage cage.
• Glass and frames are clean, and the windows open and close.
• It smells like an empty room, not like a previous life.

Wear is a different matter and you should expect plenty of it: dulled paint, flattened carpet, tired seals. Those are the building’s age, not the last tenant’s habits, and expecting a rental to look new is the fastest way to have a conversation nobody enjoys.

The first hour, before the van

This is the whole article in one instruction: do not let furniture into the flat until you have photographed it empty.

An empty flat photographs in eleven minutes and can never be photographed again. Once the sofa is against the wall, the mark behind it is permanently ambiguous.

1. Oven, door open, racks in.
2. Fridge and freezer, empty, doors open.
3. The extractor filter, taken out of the hood.
4. Every worktop, end to end.
5. Shower screen, tiles, taps and the drain.
6. The toilet, from above.
7. Every floor, corner to corner, including the edges.
8. Every wall, especially any that has been patched.
9. Window glass, frames, sills and rebates.
10. Meter readings, and the keys themselves laid out.

Then do one more thing that takes thirty seconds: open the cupboard under the sink and photograph that too. It is where the last tenancy hides.

The three rooms that decide everything

If you only have twenty minutes before the van arrives, spend them here. These three account for nearly every deposit argument we have ever heard about.

• The kitchen. Open the oven, pull out the extractor filter, open every cupboard and the one under the sink. Grease is dated evidence: it does not accumulate in a fortnight, and everybody knows it.
• The bathroom. Photograph the shower screen, the seals and the drain. Limescale and old seals are the two things most often described as your fault later, and both are visibly older than one tenancy.
• The floors, at the edges. Not the middle, which will be covered by furniture within the hour — the edges, the thresholds and the strip under the radiator, which is where the last tenancy is still sitting.

Everything else in the flat can be re-photographed next week if you forget. These three cannot, because within a day they will contain your food, your shampoo and your sofa.

How to raise it without starting a row

If it is not clean, say so the same day. Not because a landlord will necessarily fix it, but because a message sent on the day of arrival is evidence and a message sent in June is an opinion.

Keep it factual and unemotional, list rather than complain, and attach the photographs:

"Thanks for the keys. Before I move anything in, a few things are not clean: the oven, the extractor filter, and inside the kitchen cupboards. Photographs attached, taken today. Could you let me know whether you would like to arrange this, or whether I should — I am happy either way, I just want it recorded so it is clear at the end of the tenancy."

That last clause is the important one. You are not demanding; you are establishing a baseline. Most landlords read it exactly that way and the reply is usually reasonable.

When it is faster to just do it

Sometimes the answer is to clean it yourself and get on with your life — you have a van outside and a friend holding one end of a wardrobe, and a week of emails about an oven is worse than an oven.

That is a completely legitimate choice, with one condition: keep the record anyway. Photograph it dirty, photograph it clean, keep the message you sent. You have not given up anything by doing the work; you have simply made sure that nobody can later describe your work as your mess.

If the flat is genuinely bad — a heavy-smoker’s flat, a kitchen nobody has touched in years, a bathroom with real mould — that is the point at which a professional move-in clean stops being a luxury and starts being cheaper than your own weekend. That is what our move-in and move-out cleaning is for, and the same photographs that prove the work also happen to prove the state it started in.

Either way, the principle holds all the way to the last day of the tenancy: the tenant with photographs has a conversation, and the tenant without photographs has a feeling.

Frequently asked questions